By Anandh Venkatraman, Head of Consulting Global COE’s, Dell Technologies
On one side, human existence is being challenged by a non-living particle with the entire medical fraternity up in arms to save humanity and on the other side, enterprises across the globe are quite far along now their hyper digitization journeys to maximize their returns while minimizing human involvement. With the way that humanity is caught in the middle and its future hangs in the balance, it is equally fascinating to examine how the technology world order is changing rapidly as we speak.
The world is moving towards everything-on-the-cloud and everything-as-a-service model. Gone are the days when organizations needed to invest a fortune in datacenters and staff large IT teams to take care of their IT needs. In a decade, datacenters will be considered to belong in the stone age. Interestingly, not only is IT infrastructure being cloudified, but also physical working infrastructure will be a thing of the past. Organizations have seen the benefits of working from home, and the last three quarters have proved how effective it could be for the ecosystem. Saving commute time, saving on international travel, saving on fuel and electricity, reducing carbon footprint – the positive effects of lockdown on the natural environment certainly gave much cause for hope and also gave rise to the term “anthropause”[1].
One thing that has changed for the common man is that the adoption of digital has significantly increased. Online banking, phone-based payments, chat bots, e-commerce, online deliveries have all undergone hyper adoption. So, companies that have been in the traditional mode of operations have realized that they will soon be “kodaked”[2], as people become more and more digitally enabled and transform into digital nomads. Entire cities are moving to the cloud, and the city of Helsinki is making waves by adopting a concept called City as a Service.
Everything-as-a-Service, the new world order
To meet significant increases in demand, enterprises are in a hyper-digitization mode to scale up their infrastructure by moving to the cloud. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure are innovating daily and competing to ensure that their customers adoption and journey to the cloud is as seamless as possible. Extrapolating the current trend, cloud will become the computing engine in the immediate future. Infrastructure will be a commodity, and customized industry-based services and outcomes are what enterprises will look for from cloud vendors. In the new world order, everything will be available as a service. While it is very difficult to provide a one-size-fits-all model in the cloud environment, the adoption of the hybrid multi cloud model will continue to be a priority with enterprises. Soon there will be a multi-cloud platform (Java of the cloud), where workloads could seamlessly flow across different cloud vendors like a breeze. In the current model, once you are locked into the native implementations, it becomes very difficult to migrate.
Traditional functions like marketing and sales will also be kodaked soon, because once everything on the cloud becomes a service – marketing, sales, finance could be handled remotely, and their intelligence moved to AI platforms on the cloud. The day is not far when we will start seeing organizations offer marketing-as-a-service, sales-as-a-service, finance-as-a-service etc.
The word “software engineer” could very well soon be a thing of the past, with developers being referred to as full stack engineers or polyglot programmers. The world is moving from creating products through code, to assembling solutions like LEGO blocks. Technologists of the future will be like gourmet chefs – assembling frameworks to create quick, efficient and cost-effective solutions on the cloud for end-users/customers. What used to get accomplished in months takes weeks now, and in the immediate future could be assembled in hours. One point to ponder then, would be: how do we keep the millions of traditional software developers relevant in the future context? This is a topic that would require a separate analysis.
Resilience and innovation in the new age
Now, given that enterprises are rapidly migrating to the cloud there is increased insecurity about 24/7 availability, security, data, compliance etc. Organizations are adopting state-of-the-art business-critical cyber recovery solutions that protect, back up and help restore digital assets. Going into the future, cloud providers will offer Business Resiliency/Cyber Recovery as a service in their respective platforms for enterprises to consume. Cloud providers will increasing become a one-stop-shop for the digital and infrastructure need of the enterprise.
Saving the best for the last, any conversation about digitization is not complete if you don’t talk about the possibilities of 5G. The combination of IoT, edge computing, AI/ML and a mobile-dedicated bandwidth into the cloud is the recipe for laser-focused outcomes for the technology industry. This can be likened to giving a super car to an enthusiast in an eight-lane German autobahn. This will redefine the very nature of business across the globe. Soon, wars will not be fought on battle fields but on clouds, soon national boundaries will become less relevant, but ecosystems and kingdoms will be created on the cloud. The future of mankind will be left to his imagination to conceive, construct and conquer. The bigger question then arises: what happened to the virus?
[1] The term anthropause refers to a global reduction in modern human activity, especially travel, and was coined by a team of researchers in June 2020 in an article discussing the possible impact of COVID-19 lockdown on wildlife.
[2] Kodaked is a term used for technology extinction
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